Hacker News Reader

Comment by zvmaz | Hacker News Reader

> [...] most of the really great discoveries which had ultimately proved to be beneficial to mankind had been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.

> "Curiosity?" asked Mr. Eastman. "Yes," I replied, "curiosity, which mayor may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered.

"Curiosity" goes back to a few centuries ago, and in Europe? Short-sighted and eurocentric.

View on HN

It is basically a teleological and short-sighted narrative: everybody was living in darkness until a handful of people plucked Enlightenment out of thin air.

My point is not to disparage the contributions of those great scientists, but rather that they were working on a specific cultural and technological context, leveraging advances that others before them had taken centuries to develop. It is only because we usually take all that previous knowledge for granted that the contributions of early modern scientists seem to have come out of nowhere.

No amount of 'progressive' re-writing of history or (ironically) whiggish re-interpretations of what some non-western cultures (including mine) did will change the fact that science as we understand it began in Europe around the early modern period and it had the most revolutionary effect on the the world. This is why the oft quoted trivia that Cleopatra is closer to us than to Imhotep is so striking.

Having said that, there's an excellent scholarly work of revisionist history written by Lucio Russo called the Forgotten Revolution that I can recommend for some pleasuraeble outrage.

You are reading too much into my comment, as others have done. "Curiosity" (note "curiosity", not science) does not go back to Newton, Bacon, Galileo. It's a stupid and shortsighted statement by the author. No need to read scientific counter-historiographies, be a post-modern "social constructivist" about reason and science, or a "progressive" cultural relativist to see that this statement is just stupid.

I added that it's eurocentric because that's what it felt when I read it (and it probably is, since even non-human animals are probably curious, too).

Shameful that this man living 100 years ago isn't as progressive as I am.

He's saying it goes at least that far back, not that Francis bacon invented curiosity.

There is another source of really great discoveries: goal-driven research which fails to achieve its predefined goals, but discovers something completely unrelated which turns out to be useful.

Anyone who worked in research knows that this is the usual way of discovery. Few people complete a PhD on the topic they originally aimed for.

Curious if you could build a time machine, go back to 1939 and give them a earful.

This seems like one of those examples of looking for a reason to be mad. They were hardly giving credit to Europeans for inventing curiosity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com